Currently, many enterprises have deployed a call center. The call center is a platform connected to a media gateway (MGW) and a media gateway control function (MGCF) gateway in a Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) network and responsible for processing related Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) signaling and voice rich media streams. Users can conveniently perform operations such as service consulting and service handling by means of the call center.
In the existing technology, a user may call a call center of an enterprise by using a phone terminal, and the call center sends a service menu of a corresponding service to the phone terminal in a voice manner. In this way, the user can receive the service menu by using the phone terminal and interact with the call center to implement various service operations. However, an existing method for interacting with a call center in a voice manner requires a user to listen to and memorize a voice menu first and then perform a corresponding operation according to a voice prompt, leading to inconvenient user operation.
Conventional call centers use voice menus that are complicated and difficult for a user to follow and select the correct options. Without the ability to visualize the call center option menus, the user frequently makes the wrong selection and goes down a menu path that is not what he/she needs, or the user may miss the correct option and have to listen to the entire menu and then replay the menu to select the correct option. The call experience with conventional call centers with automated voice-over menus is also time-consuming and frustrating to the user. In addition, due to the excessive amount of time that each user may spend on the call with the call center during the menu navigation stage, the call center server may be overloaded and reject new incoming calls or drop on-going calls, making the user's experience even worse.
With the conventional call centers' voice menu navigation, the requirement on the call center's data processing capabilities is high, making the cost of operating a call center prohibitive for many enterprises. As such, there is a need for an improved way to operate call centers. Currently, some large enterprises provide visual menu call centers. However, the call center server is designed specially to include visual and audio menu capabilities at the coding level for the call center server's operation. Such implementation is not feasible for smaller enterprises that do not have resources to operate its own call centers or specifically program the call center server for its own customized visual and audio menu capabilities. Thus, there is also a need for a generalized solution to adapt to existing call center structures and operations, and provide customized visual menu capabilities on top of existing audio menu capabilities of the existing call center structures and operations.